{"id":596,"date":"2006-03-29T17:39:59","date_gmt":"2006-03-29T16:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2006\/03\/29\/melanie_phillips_soundbite_of_the_week_3"},"modified":"2025-10-10T21:48:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T20:48:37","slug":"melanie_phillips_soundbite_of_the_week_3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2006\/03\/29\/melanie_phillips_soundbite_of_the_week_3","title":{"rendered":"Melanie Phillips soundbite of the week (3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was going to blog this<\/a> clanger in Mad Mel's latest diary entry, but PhobeWatch<\/a> and Saracen<\/a> beat me to it. This is Mel excoriating "Britain's man of straw", the man MPACUK wanted to unseat because of his support for Israel and the Iraq war, on his recent speech to the Muslim News Awards ceremony:<\/p>\n

\nLet us remind ourselves who these Muslims were who made these calls for the hostages\u2019 safe release. After consultations with the Foreign Office, the Muslim Association of Britain \u2013 the British arm of the Muslim Brotherhood which works for the Islamisation of Britain and Europe — dispatched its president, Anas al-Tikriti, to Iraq to negotiate with the kidnappers. The MAB also persuaded Sheikh al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood\u2019s mentor and supporter of human bombs in Iraq and Israel, as well as the leaders of Hamas, Hizbollah and 23 other Muslim organisations, to sign a press release calling for Kember and three other hostages to be freed. The al Qaeda leader Abu Qatada was also pressed into service to appeal for their release from his prison cell, as did Moazzam Begg, the British man who had previously been detained at Guantanamo Bay<\/strong>, while Muslims at Finsbury Park mosque — now run once more by the Brotherhood — said prayers for Kember\u2019s safe return which were played on televisions across the world.
\nThe British Foreign Secretary has now said, in effect, that the lives of Norman Kember and the other two hostages were saved thanks to the Muslim Brotherhood. What price will the Brotherhood now exact from Britain in return?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The obvious howler here is that Moazzam Begg is not known to be associated with the Muslim Brotherhood; he is a British Muslim of Pakistani origin who was abducted in Pakistan and handed over to US forces who then sent him to Guantánamo Bay. What has this to do with the MAB? They just happened to be the Muslim arm of the anti-war movement and had the right contacts in the Arab world, but their intermediation came to naught anyway: Kember was freed by the SAS, not by his captors under the Brothers' influence. (Tags: jack straw<\/a>, melanie phillips<\/a>, norman kember<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was going to blog this clanger in Mad Mel's latest diary entry, but PhobeWatch and Saracen beat me to it. This is Mel excoriating "Britain's man of straw", the man MPACUK wanted to...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-melanie_phillips"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-9C","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42518,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions\/42518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}